What DFW Left Behind

In the four intervening years since David Foster Wallace's suicide, significant ink has been spilled in describing Wallace's early struggles with mental illness as well as those more recent ones that culminated in his death. One need only look to D. T. Max's New Yorker article that served as the precursor to his recently published biography, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012), or David Lipsky's "The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace" (2009) to get a sense of what most Wallace retrospectives were like. Literary scholars, though, must resist the temptation to see Wallace's works between the mid-1980s and 2008 only through the lens of his disease and how he died.

For their part, the contributors to The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, admirably do not limit their consideration of Wallace's works to whether this piece or that piece might have predicted his demise. The volume contains thoroughly researched academic essays punctuated with brief remembrances by fiction writers like Don DeLillo, George Saunders, and Rick Moody. Given the constituent elements, the remembrances and academic works could easily wallow in viewing Wallace's work through the lens of his untimely death, which would be disappointment. Instead, something delightfully odd happens.

The eulogistic tone of the literary luminaries provides a weird counterpoint to the academic voice employed by critics. DeLillo invites us to see Wallace as "a brave writer who struggled against the force that wanted him to shed himself." Remarks like this stand in deep tonal contrast to the academic pronouncements in the scholarly works, like this assertion by Heather Houser about Infinite Jest (1996): "By delineating how social and grammatical detachment motivate the novel's main plots, distinguish its style, and attract Wallace's satirical eye, I will establish that detachment is not only a psychological and ethical problem in Infinite Jest but, crucially, also a spatial one." From that quote, it is easy to see how the critical content of Legacy grew out of an MLA roundtable on Wallace in 2009 and, presumably, the remembrances were included to add value to the book. It is presumed because the editors do not comment on the creative pieces beyond saying that they have grouped these essays in order to "interpolate the shorter creative pieces in ways that resonate with the critical essays that surround them."

The main way in which these works resonate is that they all argue, whether in terms belletristic or academic, that Wallace's works ought to remain important. In addition to exalting Wallace as a kindhearted, brilliant, and talented soul, the fiction writers' remarks mostly predict that his works will continue to engage and delight readers in decades to come. The editors of Legacy, as well as the academic contributors, are trying to do the same thing with more specificity. The academic articles are presented as potentially new and rewarding areas of inquiry for enterprising scholars to explore, grouping them into sections labeled "History," "Aesthetics," and "Community."

Yet the most exciting directions of inquiry in this collection are not necessarily the most novel. Ed Finn's study of how different social networks understand Wallace posits a plausible new direction for scholarship to go in; however, the resulting analysis comparing Amazon reviews to those generated by professional critics does not yield many compelling avenues for further study. On the other hand, the three articles in the "Aesthetics" section of Legacy all focus on Infinite Jest and elaborate interestingly on existing research. Cohen's, Konstantinou's, and Houser's contributions deal with Wallace's aesthetic choices and build persuasively on what's come before. In particular, co-editor Samuel Cohen's contribution, titled "To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next...